A Companion to Hobbes. Группа авторов

      1 ¹ Hobbes exhorts those with a sincere desire to be philosophers to “let your reason move upon the deep of your own cogitations and experience; those things that lie in confusion must be set asunder, distinguished, and every one stamped with its own name set in order; that is to say your method must resemble that of the creation. The order of the creation was, light, distinction of day and night, the firmament, the luminaries, sensible creatures, man; and after the creation, the commandment. Therefore, the order of contemplation will be, reason, definition, space, the stars, sensible quality, man; and after man is grown up, subjection to command” (EW I. xiii). Hobbes echoes the appeal to two parallel, but separate, sources of insight into truth prevalent in seventeenth-century Calvinist Scholastic textbooks and Francis Bacon’s work: the book of nature and Holy Scripture. Schmidt-Biggemann explains that for seventeenth-century Calvinist Scholastics, “Knowledge was understood as an inventory of the Revelation made available to humankind, as knowledge found in the Bible, History, and Nature. These three ‘books’ were the field of experience which according to God’s creation plan is inventoried in knowledge” (Schmidt-Biggemann 2001, 394; translation mine).

      2 ² Meteorology, Optics, and Music were all mixed mathematical sciences in the Scholastic tradition; logic was considered the instrument of philosophy, not part of natural philosophy proper.

      3 ³ See Hattab (2009, 93–8).

      4 ⁴ Hobbes’s division most resembles that of early seventeenth-century Calvinist Scholastic textbooks in which “The framework of metaphysics was theological, not the other way around. Hence one counted metaphysical concepts within natural theology and in this way, natural philosophy and metaphysics were made broadly coextensive” (Schmidt-Biggemann 2001, 394, translation mine). For Hobbes, likewise, topics of traditional Aristotelian metaphysics, like the first cause, its eternity, and the immortality of the soul are relegated to Theology. Remaining metaphysical topics, like the nature of substance, its accidents and causation are absorbed into natural philosophy under Hobbes’s First Philosophy.

      5 ⁵ Alessandro Piccolomini and subsequent Aristotelian mathematicians reclassified mechanics, the art of machines, which was traditionally considered a craft, as a mixed mathematical science (Hattab 2009, 93–8). Marcus Adams discusses Hobbes’s treatment of physics as a mixed mathematical science, which following the Aristotelian tradition of such sciences, borrows its principles from the more fundamental science of geometry, and applies them to nature to deduce physical effects (Adams 2017, 84–6). This is also the sense in which Descartes considers his natural philosophy mathematical and mechanical and appears to be a common thread in the so-called early modern “mechanists” (Hattab 2009, 120–35, 2019).

      6 ⁶ The English edition misleads since it mistranslates cognitio with “science” in the last sentence, falsely implying that Hobbes counts experience as scientific knowledge: “But we are then said to know any Effect, when we know, that there be Causes of the same, and in what Subiect those Causes are, and in what Subiect they produce that Effect, and in what Manner they work the same. And this is the Science of Causes, or as they call it of the διότι. All other science, which is called the ὅτι, is either Perception by Sense, or the Imagination, or Memory remaining after such Perception” (EW I.48–9).

      7 ⁷ This aspect of the generic method generates a persistent misreading of Hobbes’s specific method of analysis as akin to the first phase of Jacopo Zabarella’s regressus, which further gets conflated with a different sense of method in which Zabarella appeals to analysis. For example, see Hanson (1990, 587–626), MacPherson (1968, 25–9), Röd (1970, 10–15), Hungerland and Vick (1981, 25–7), Watkins (1973, 63–5), and Duncan (2003). J. Prins demonstrates how differences between Hobbes’s and Zabarella’s views on logic affect their views on method and scientific knowledge (Prins 1990, 26–46). Jesseph revised his view noting that any number of extant views on analysis and synthesis could have influenced Hobbes’s (Jesseph 2004, 191–211). I show that the regressus, a proof enabling one to deduce a possible natural cause from observed effects, and then in turn, deduce that the possible cause is the actual cause of the natural effect, does not map onto Hobbes’s method. Linking the two stems from substantive confusions between the regressus and what Zabarella calls “method as order.” Zabarella only discusses “analysis” in the context of method as order. Wherever Hobbes gets this label, his sense of “analysis” is unrelated to the regressus and closer to later Scholastics uses than Zabarella’s (Hattab 2014).

      8 ⁸ Most Scholastic Aristotelians accept Aristotle’s claim at the start of Nicomachean Ethics that practical matters do not allow for the same precision as theoretical matters and hence require a distinct method (Aristotle 1984, 1730).

      9 ⁹ Zabarella notes, when we define mathematical entities, our definitions are advanced as principles “since they are heard and understood at the same time, and are known per se” (Zabarella 1597, 159). This is because things like “line” and “surface” are simple accidents, so the declaration of merely the word suffices to signify the essence. In other words, in mathematics, nominal and essential definitions of the object coincide; thus, in mathematics, one has a perfect definition once one obtains a nominal definition. This view was shared by seventeenth-century mathematicians, like the Jesuit Josephus Blancanus, who claims that most mathematical definitions bear the advantage of being both nominal and essential definitions: “when it is said that an equilateral triangle is one having three equal sides, at once you see the cause for both the name and the thing” (Blancanus 1996,181). Blancanus’s work is cited in Marin Mersenne’s early publications, making it likely that Hobbes was exposed to Blancanus’s mathematical theory, via the Mersenne Circle. On this theory, definitions of mathematical objects carry the distinct advantage that their names concurrently tell you how the object is caused.

      10 ¹⁰ As Karl Schuhmann points out, both Hobbes and Spinoza appear to adopt Hero of Alexandria’s generative approach to defining geometrical objects (Schuhmann 1987, 72).

      11 ¹¹ Marcus Adams, following Pérez-Ramos, calls this “maker’s knowledge” and argues that it constitutes the causal knowledge of scientia for Hobbes. On his interpretation, Hobbes’s commitment to maker’s knowledge accounts for why geometry and civil science are the only instances of science for Hobbes (Adams 2019, 2). Since both the geometer and the political philosopher construct their actual object, the same procedure can be applied in these domains, a procedure not available to the physicist who studies

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